And there is a very big difference between the minimum wage and a living wage. Sure, some fast food employees do make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, but as countless projects have shown, workers need to make a lot more than that just to be above the poverty level in their respective cities. As Yash Bhutada wrote in his piece for PolicyMic earlier this week citing the Living Wage Project, “A single adult in New York would need to make $12.75 an hour, which is far above the $9 an hour minimum wage that New York State has plans to implement over the next three years. Add a child and the number jumps to $24.69. In Chicago, that adult would need $10.48.”

If you think you could live off of a fast food employee’s salary, give Mother Jones’ calculator a try. Just enter in your household size, state, area in state, and it will tell you how much you need to make a year to earn a living wage. A single adult living in New York with no children would need to earn $23,929 annually “to make a secure yet modest living,” at $11.47 an hour. At the current wage rate, that employee would have work 51 hours a week to make a living wage in New York.

It's true that McDonald’s website offers a tool to help its employees budget their money. But, as the site LowPayIsNotOk.org pointed out, “the tool assumes that employees using it will have to cobble together incomes from at least two jobs to earn a little more than $24,500 per year — what the budget claims it takes to make ends meet.” This corresponds roughly to wages of $12.80 per hour after taxes, which we know is way more than the $8.94 average wage of a McDonald's worker.

LowPayIsNotOk.org features a video on their website urging workers to strike on Thursday and providing a “strike kit” to help them make the most of their efforts. So if you believe fast food workers (and all workers) deserve a living wage, then you can join them outside your local McDonald’s cheering, “Hey hey, ho ho, poverty wage has got to go.”

Melanie Breault just returned from teaching English in Seoul, South Korea. She now works for a women's nonprofit in Downtown NYC. She earned her bachelor's degree in economic and political journalism from Ithaca College in upstate New York. She likes to tackle issues facing marginalized workers and struggling students in her free time.